Is CTV Really Advertising's Premium Pasture?

"Here's a story about Kuh Elsa: A butler informs his employer, the Count, that one of his cows has died. The Count owns more than 3,000 of them, so he barely reacts. Unfortunate, he says, but hardly catastrophic. Cows die. That is, after all, what cows do. Still, he asks how it happened. The roof of the barn fell on her head."

"Why did the roof fall? Because the barn burned down. Why did the barn burn? Sparks flew from the manor house. Why was the manor on fire? Because the Count's son fell down the stairs and broke both arms while carrying a candle, trying to create a nice atmosphere for the Countess. And why was he doing that? Because the Countess had died unexpectedly."

"Connected TV has a faint Cow Elsa quality to it. CTV is being sold as the premium pasture of digital advertising. The big screen in the living room. Lean-back viewing. Higher attention. Brand-safe adjacency. TV budgets migrating into streaming environments that promise the efficiency of digital with the gravitas of broadcast. It sounds tidy, almost redemptive. As if digital advertising, after years of chaos, has finally found a setting worthy of itself."

"But once you start asking a few quiet "why" questions, the edges stop looking quite so clean. "CTV underperformed." Why? Because impressions were misclassified. Why were they misclassified? Because device and app signals in the bidstream are often self-declared, inconsistently validated, or interpreted generously. And why is that even possible? Because the plumbing was built to prioritise liquidity. OpenRTB was designed to let inventory move. Flexibility makes markets fluid, fluid markets scale, and scale, right now, is the whole point."

The Kuh Elsa anecdote shows how a visible incident can be the outcome of a long causal chain. Connected TV is presented as a premium, lean-back advertising environment promising broadcast gravitas with digital efficiency. Probing reveals that CTV impressions can be misclassified because device and app signals in the bidstream are often self-declared, inconsistently validated, or interpreted generously. That vulnerability stems from ad-exchange plumbing where OpenRTB and similar protocols prioritise liquidity to let inventory move. That flexibility scales markets, but creates trade-offs between scale and signal quality that can undermine campaign performance.

Read at Exchangewire